Over the years, people have started to write manuals (i.e. something with a linear organization) a couple times:
They¡¯ve even gone to some trouble to make nicely¡ªprintable versions:
But none of those efforts have really continued. The people involved would be the ones to say definitively why, but it seems to me that it was an unfortunate balance of motivation and desire: The people who wanted to work on the manuals were trying to make a contribution, spent a lot of time creating them, but most of the comments they got back were requests for them to do even more work (!) When the first PDF manual came out, the first few JMRIusers posts were mostly requests: better cross-references, a different font, even a request that it "come out earlier next time¡±!
I think it would be great if a few people decided to create a printable, linear manual. They could start with one of the older ones, or start anew from the help pages, or whatever other strategy they want. One way to do it quickly would be to pretty-print a few of the key web pages to make a PDF, then create a table of contents and/or index.
Bob
On Aug 13, 2018, at 6:24 PM, george.pendergraft <gmpender@...> wrote:
Yes, but I for one like to have something in my hand to read. A real printed manual at my leisure instead of staring at a computer monitor. I can also concentrate on learning about the program whenever I want to without having to go back and fourth between the program and the online manual. That is just me. Granted, if there are manuals that are incomplete or out of date like those of today, then a manual to that extent is not going to do much training. Thus my solution to set a release date for the software to come out every year, and put a printable manual out for use in that year. Makes sense to me. Unfortunately I am not knowledgeable enough on the software to help with the writing of such a large undertaking. And I do realize it is a big undertaking. But many of us (like me) out here are just squeaking by on how to use the software and as some say even the software instructions for today would be inadequate to instruct anyone today just because things are changing so fast. But it would be nice to have something to look at in my lap while learning the software. Anyone else out there agree?
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Bob Jacobsen
rgj1927@...
Bob Jacobsen